


And we will never be afraid again

by Innsmouth



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-23 03:57:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2533292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innsmouth/pseuds/Innsmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You wake to find fingers digging into your sides with bruising intensity, your godly raiment soaked through with a sprawling sunburst of blood, and your paradoxical motherdaughter muttering mingled pleas and furious invective into your ear.</p><p> </p><p>Rose grieves, and falls, and rises again. The only way to forge a blade is in fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And we will never be afraid again

You wake to find fingers digging into your sides with bruising intensity, your godly raiment soaked through with a sprawling sunburst of blood, and your paradoxical motherdaughter muttering mingled pleas and furious invective into your ear.  
  
There is no real aftermath, no licking of wounds. It is all too raw and urgent for that, burning into the forefront of your mind. You are not in shock, or in denial. The events of the past several minutes, while slightly disjointed in your memory, are free of fog or confusion. Your Land is destroyed. Your friends are dead. Your ~~entanglement~~ ~~flushcrush~~ girlfriend is also dead. The last is what stays with you most. What you see most clearly in your mind’s eye is Kanaya, defiant, her features sharp slashes of shadow seared away in a torrent of white light. The sight of her standing before her doom has yet to leave you. You doubt that it ever will.

Beyond that image, you are left with what little remains of her – a shredded piece of her skirt and enough ash to fit in the hollow of your hand. Morbid curiosity makes you stare hard at the ounce or so of calcined cremains dusting the creases of your palm. Kanaya, in dying, has shown you fear in a handful of dust. Eliot would be proud.

You turn your attention to the other remaining relic of the girl you loved so fiercely. The edges of the fragment of Kanaya’s skirt are raggedly cut, not singed. Perhaps it was another casualty of the last great rising arc of her chainsaw. It’s doubtful that you’ll ever know for sure. Instead of stowing it in your sylladex, you weave it through your fingers over and over, part distraction and part bastard rosary. Forgive you, lover, for you have failed.  
  
Your ectoprogeny is a stable yet anxious presence at the periphery of your focus; it is with a pang of remorse that you tear yourself away from your rumination in order to greet her. Anything you might have said is effectively silenced by Roxy sweeping you up into a crushing embrace and saying, in a steady voice silver-veined through with sorrow, “Fuckin’ Christ, Mom, I am _so sorry_.” In lieu of replying, you simply rest your head against her collarbones and allow her to apologize, over and over and over, and eventually making a few cautious remarks in the vein of “It’s gonna be okay.” There is no sudden malfunction of the waterworks on your end. You are not the sort to cry in public, despite the tracks that tears of fury and raw, sudden loss have left streaking down your cheeks. You do however allow yourself to express how glad you are to see her, even in the wake of everything.  
  
“About the fact that you whisked me away an instant before my swiftly approaching death,” you say, “Thanks.”  
  
Roxy shrugs an expansive, loose-limbed shrug, as though to suggest that things like this fall to her with alarming frequency. “Gotta do what you gotta do,” she says. “Especially when it involves swooping in all Dudley Do-Right and saving the shit out of my mom. I mean daughter. I mean fuck this, you get it.” Her tone is casual, but her eyes are glassy-flat with unshed tears.  
  
You assure her that you do in fact get it, that once again you are grateful for her timely rescue, and that you are unspeakably happy to finally meet her. Only then do you excuse yourself, claiming that you need to meditate on possible outcomes of this course of events. For that you need peace and relative isolation, and Roxy, though reluctant, does oblige you. She throws you a wave and a slightly concerned look over her shoulder as she steps away into the foggy dimness of voidspace.  
  
Only when she is out of earshot do you let yourself succumb to grief.  
  
You felt for Kanaya deeply, with the ardent urgency that only a first infatuation provides. Her presence in your life was less a pleasant surprise than a need; you had both been through so much, had been left with so little, that it was only natural that you cling together in the face of fell adversity. She was the one stable presence, the one beacon of reason that you could cling to in the blacker hours of the night when you awoke feeling clotted frogspawn in your mouth and tentacles under your skin. Dead or not, all gods dream, and yours were less a refuge than a battlefield. Kanaya had been there for you, through the deaths, the nightmares, the drinking, the fumbling courtship.  
  
You loved her. It felt right.  
  
In romance, you had surrendered your desperate, anxious control; Kanaya had taken the reins, as was fitting with your class and Aspect.  
As Seer of Light, your role is not to lead. Your role is to guide, to tutor, to advise. You are to reveal solutions to dilemmas great and small. You are to illuminate.  
  
You are to shine.  
  
Of late, you have done none of those things. Of late you have idled, and dawdled, and spent nights drinking away your apprehension until no precognitive vision in the multiverse could have saved you.  
There is little left to you now. There is Roxy, yes, blood of your blood and sister in implausible existence, precious in her foreign familiarity, but apart from her, you have nothing. The Land of Light and Rain is no more, crushed and shattered against LOFAF’s frozen surface; with it goes your quest, your role, your childhood, even.  
  
None of your myriad defense mechanisms seem to be functioning properly; they lack targeting parameters, objectives, clear reasons to deploy themselves in defense of your shoddily-built Maginot Line of the brain. You can’t think. You need a drink, and so you delve into the depths of your elegant, yet wildly impractical Tree Modus in search of a bottle of wine.  
  
A leaf falls, knocked askew by your clumsy searching. Something clinks against the blackspace floor of the void and rolls to a stop against your foot. You bend down to pick it up, knees creaking in cantankerous protest that gods are not immune from petty human stiffness.  
  
It is a tube of lipstick. Probably one of yours, though you and she swapped cosmetics so often that sometimes it’s difficult to be sure. You twist it to show jade green. A rich, vibrant color. Kanaya’s color.  
  
Everything hits you at once, then: the pain, the loss, the consuming anger at anyone who _dared_ take your lover from you. It comes out in a sick black torrent of mingled tears and raw-voiced screaming rage, and in the periphery of your Sight you feel Roxy hesitate, concerned. By the end of it your throat is tender and inflamed and your eyes are bloodshot, your cheeks spattered with pinprick petechial starbursts.  
  
Dimly, you realize that you’ve cried off all of your makeup. With trembling fingers, you twist the lipstick, raise, and reapply, coating your lips in the color of age-old forests. It doesn’t help; you are vibrating like a tuning-fork struck by some unknown hand.  
  
Something fraying snaps inside you then.  
  
Voidspace is not a solid wall of nothing; there are tears, weak spots, battered patches where beings unseen have come and gone. You call upon your gods (and they are ever yours, as you are ever theirs) to find the way, and they oblige. _Seer_ , they say, _welcome home, Our beloved scion. We have missed you._ You claw them aside without response, shouldering through a cobwebbed tear in the universe into a short passage before the scene of your greatest heartbreak. The Ring-dwellers’ disapproval at your silence burns like acid, pitting and melting the tender parts of your brain, but you pay them no heed.  
  
You can see light through the veiny strands of shadow, close enough to touch. Beyond them is the apocalypse. It would be prudent to turn back. You must, if you wish to survive.  
  
You give the tube of lipstick a savage three-quarter twist and find yourself holding a chainsaw. It lies heavy and still in your grasp, like a guard dog kept barely to heel. The weight of it is foreign, dangerous, liable to turn on you in a heartbeat.  
  
It is only fitting that you use it. It was hers.  
  
You twine the ragged scrap of red fabric through your fingers one more time before tying it to your headband like a lady’s favor.  
  
Fury makes you reckless. The last time you lost someone, you hurled yourself into darkness and came up void-touched and howling. You threw yourself into battle again and again, though Jack could not help but prove victorious.  
  
Fury makes you reckless. It always has, and likely always will. It does today. There is a pounding in your head and a fire in your belly and your knuckles are tight, tight, tight around the crosshatched handle of the chainsaw.  
  
Fury makes you reckless, but there is no darkness to sink yourself in now. All you have is your grief, weaponized.  
  
As you pull the ripcord, the chainsaw rumbles to life with a roaring whine. A flash of red dances at the edge of your sight. Your lips taste of oil and pigment and wax, all swirled together into defiantly brilliant jade.  
  
You step out into the light, but you do not shine.  
  
You blaze.

**Author's Note:**

> Update fic for the wonderful Elly (yoccu.tumblr.com).
> 
> Title is taken from Florence and the Machine's 'Spectrum,' and the fic itself is directly inspired by this post: http://kanrose.co.vu/post/101028839042/the-update-was-really-painful-but-just-imagine


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